"Oh, she is not like the roseThat proud in beauty blows——"
And goes on something about:
"And if 'tis heaven's decreeThat mine she may not be——"
So sweet, so tuneful, so utterly tender and touching that—well, I know how I should have felt about him had I been Miss Million, who three days ago considered herself truly in love with the owner of this calling, calling tenor voice!
Had I been Miss Million, I could not have sat there with my hand firmly and affectionately clasped in the hand of another man, ignoring my first attraction. No; if I had been my mistress instead of just myself, I could not have remained so stolidly pointing out to the Honourable Jim that all was indeed over.
I could not have refused him a glance, a turn of the head in the direction of the voice that crooned so sweetly through the purring rush of the car.
However, this was all—as Million herself would say—neither here nor there. Apart from this Scotland Yard complication, she was Miss Million, the heiress, drifting slowly but surely in the direction of an eligible love affair with her American cousin.
I had nothing whatever to do with her rejected admirer, or how he was treated.
I was merely Miss Million's maid, Beatrice Lovelace, alias Smith, with an eligible love affair of her own on hand. How I wished my Mr. Reginald Brace could have been anywhere get-at-able! He would have been so splendid, so reliable!
He would have—well, I don't know what he could have done, exactly. I suppose that even he could scarcely have interfered with the carrying out of the law! Still, I felt that it would have been a great comfort to have had him there in that car.
And, as I am going to be engaged to him, there would have been nothing incorrect in allowing him to hold my hand. In fact, I should have done so. I hadn't got any gloves with me, and the night air was now chill.
"Why, your little hands are as cold as ice, MissSmith," murmured Mr. James Burke to me as the car stopped at last outside what are called the grim portals of justice. (Plenty of grimness about the portals, anyway!) "You ought to have kept——"
Even at that awful moment he made me wonder if he were really going to say, boldly out before the detective and everybody: "You ought to have kept your hands in mine as I wanted you to!"
But no. He had the grace to conclude smoothly and conventionally: "You ought to have kept the rug up about you!"
Then came "Good-nights"—rather a mockery under the circumstances—and the departure of the two young men, with a great many parting protests from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop about the "prepassterousness" of the whole procedure. Then we arrested "prisoners" were taken down a loathsome stone corridor and handed over to a——
Words fail me, as they failed Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. I can't think of words unpleasant enough to describe the odiousness of that particular wardress into whose charge we were given.
The only excuse for her was that she imagined—why, I don't know, for surely she could have seen that there was nothing of that type about either Miss Million or Miss Smith—she imagined that we were militant Suffragettes!
And she certainly did make herself disagreeable to us.
The one mercy about this was that it braced Miss Million up to abstain from shedding tears—which she seemed inclined to do when we were separated.
Words didn't fail her! I heard the ex-maid-servant's clearest kitchen accent announcing exactly what she thought of "that" wardress and "that" detective, and "that there old Rattenheimer" until stone walls and heavy doors shut her from earshot....
I only hope that her rage has kept up all night, that it's prevented her from relapsing into the misery and terror in which she started away from the shelter of Vi Vassity's wing at the "Refuge"! For then, I know, she was perfectly convinced that what we were setting out for was, at the very least, ten years' penal servitude! Evidently Miss Million hasn't the slightest touch of faith in the ultimate triumph of all Innocence.
To her, because that Rattenheimer ruby is stolen, and she and her maid are suspected of being the thieves, it means that it's impossible for us to be cleared!
I don't feel that; but I do feel the humiliation and the discomfort of having been put in prison!
How many nights like the last, I wonder dismally, am I to spend in this horrible little cell?
Well! I suppose this morning will show us.
This morning, in about an hour's time, I suppose we are to go before the magistrate of this court, and to answer the "serious charge" that has been brought against us by Mr. Julius Rattenheimer.
There!
The much-dreaded ordeal is over.
That is, it is over for the present. For we have been committed for trial, and that trial is still to come.
We shall have to go on living somehow under a cloud of the blackest suspicion. But there's one ray of comfort that I find among the inky gloom of my (mental) surroundings.
At least, there isn't going to be any more prison cell for us to-night! At least, I shall have a long and perfect and much-needed sleep in my delightfully luxurious white bed at the Hotel Cecil.
For that's where we've returned for the day, to pack up a few more things before we accept Miss Vi Vassity's kindly invitation and return to the "Refuge"—a refuge indeed!
It's too good of her to welcome two suspect characters such as my young mistress and me among her professional friends.
The Breathing Statue, the Boy-Impersonator, the Serio, the emerald-green-tighted Acrobat Lady—these all dwell on the heights of respectability as far as their private characters are concerned.
Of course, Marmora, the Twentieth-Century Hebe, is an arrant flirt, but a girl may be that and a model of propriety at the same time. This touch of naturenever fails to exasperate, for some reason, any of the men who know her. The Ventriloquist's wife and the understudy to "Cigarette" in the Number Eleven Company of "Under Two Flags," there isn't a single word to be said against any of them!
But what are we?
Two alleged jewel thieves, out on bail! And even then Mrs. Rattenheimer protested loudly in court against "those two young women" being given bail at all!
By that time Miss Million and I were so utterly crushed by all that had gone before that I verily believe neither of us felt that we deserved to be let out at large—no, not even though three of our friends were sureties for us to the tune of £300 each!
I have come to the conclusion that it takes a born criminal to act and look like a perfectly innocent person when charged with a crime!
It's the perfectly innocent person who looks the picture of guilt!
At least I know that's what poor little Miss Million looked like as she stood beside me in the dock this morning.
Her little face was as white as her handkerchief, her grey eyes were shrunk and red with crying and want of sleep. Her hair was "anyhow." Her small figure seemed more insignificant than ever.
All the confidence with which she'd faced the wardress last night seemed to have evaporated in those hours of wakeful tossing on that vilely uncomfortable prison bed. She trembled and shook. She held on to the barof the dock just as a very sea-sick passenger holds on to the steamer rail. She picked at her gloves, she nervously smoothed the creases in her pink, Bond Street tub-frock.
When the magistrate addressed her she started and gulped, and murmured "Sir" in the most utterly stricken voice I ever heard.
Altogether, if ever a young woman did look as if her sins had found her out, Miss Nellie Million, charged with stealing a valuable ruby pendant, the property of Mr. Julius Rattenheimer, looked the part at that moment.
I don't wonder the magistrate rasped at her.
As for me, I don't think I looked quite as frightened. You can't be at the same moment frightened and very angry.
I felt like murder; whom I should have wished to murder I don't quite know—the owner of the ruby alone would not have been enough for me. I was inwardly foaming with rage over having been forced into this idiotic position; also for having been made, not only mentally, but physically and acutely uncomfortable.
This is only one detail of the discomfort, but this may serve to sum up the rest; for the very first time in the whole of my life I'd had to go without my morning bath, and to stand fully dressed, but with the consciousness of being untubbed and unscrubbed, facing the world!
There was such a horrible lot of the world to face, too, in that awful police-court, where the windows weresteaming and opaque, and the walls clammy as those of an uncared-for country vestry!
The place seemed crowded with all sorts and conditions of men and women, lumped together, so to speak, in Fate's lucky-bag. And it was only after I'd given two or three resentful glances about that stuffy cave of a place that I recognised among all the strangers the faces of the people who'd come to back up Miss Million and me.
First and foremost, of course, there sat, as close to us as she could manage to get herself placed, the sumptuous, peg-top-shaped, white-clad figure of London's Love, Miss Vi Vassity, with her metallic hair.
She kissed her plump hand to us with effusion, waving encouragingly to us with her big gold mesh bag and all its glittering, clashing attachments: the cigarette case, the lip-salve tube, the gold pencil, the memorandum tablets, the Darin powder-box, the card-case, the Swastika, the lucky pig, the touchwood, the gold-tipped coral charm, the threepenny bit, and all the other odd things that rattled and jingled together like a pedlar's cart, making an unearthly stir in court.
From where I stood I could see two men sketching the owner of all this clatter!
Close beside her sat Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, very boyish, very grave; his well-cut Dana-Gibson mouth seeming to be permanently set into the exclamation, "Preppassterous!" and his serious eyes fastened on his trembling little cousin in the dock.
The Honourable James Burke sat behind them. All the policemen and officials, I noticed, were being aspleasant and deferential to that young scamp as if he were at least a judge, instead of a person who ought by rights to be locked up in the interests of the public!
To the right of him sat the author of all our troubles, Mr. Julius Rattenheimer.
I suppose all German Jews aren't odious! I suppose all German Jews aren't thick-nosed and oily skinned, with eyes like two blackberries sunk very deep in a pan of dough! I suppose they don't all run to "bulges" inside their waistcoats and over their collars, and above and below their flashing rings? I suppose they don't all talk with their hands?
No, I suppose it isn't fair to judge the whole race by one specimen.
He became wildly excited during the proceedings. Four or five times he interrupted the reading of the charge. He gesticulated, pointing at Miss Million, and crying: "Yes! Yes! She's in the pay of this udder one. Do you see? This girl Smith, that we find out has an assumed name, vot? Easy to see who is the head of the firma——
"Yes; she is the beauty vot would not have her boxes looked at. Coming to a hotel mit empty boxes, vot does that look like, yes? Two young girls, very shabby, and presently tog demselves out in the most sexbensive clothes. How they get them, no?"
The magistrate broke in severely with something about "What Mr. Rattenheimer had to say would be attended to presently."
"I say get the girl, and do not let her to be at large whoever say they will pay for her. Get this womanLovelace; she is the one we want," vociferated the awful little Hebrew; a little later on I think it was, but the whole police-court scene is one hideous confusion to me now. "Don't let her to esgabe through our hands, this girl, Beatrice Lovelace——"
My name, my real name, seemed to echo and resound all through that dreadful place. I didn't know before that I had always, at the bottom of my heart, been proud of the old name.
Yes! Even if it has been brought down to belonging to a family of nouveaux-pauvres, who are neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. Even if it is like having a complete motoring-kit, and no earthly chance of ever possessing a motor to wear it in!
Even so, it's a name that belonged to generation after generation of brave fighters; men who have served under Nelson and Wellington, Clive and Roberts!
It's their blood, theirs and that of the women who loved them, that ran hot and angry in my veins to-day, flushing my cheeks with scarlet fury to hear that name profaned in the mouth of a little stuttering, jewel-grabbing alien, who's never had a sword, or even a rifle, in his hand!
I turned my indignant eyes from him. And my eyes met, across the court, the eyes of another woman who wears the name of Lovelace!
Heavens! There was my Aunt Anastasia, sitting bolt upright in the gallery and listening to the case. Her face was whiter than Million's, and her lips were an almost imperceptible line across it!
How did she know? How had she come there? Ididn't at that moment realise the truth—namely, that the Scotland Yard officials had been busy with their inquiries, not only at what Miss Million calls the Hotel "Sizzle," but also at what used to be my home at No. 45 Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W.
Poor Aunt Anastasia, hearing that her niece was "wanted by the police" for robbery, must have received a shock forty times worse than that of my letter informing her that I had become our ex-servant's maid!
But, as I say, here she was in court ... seeing the pair of us in the dock, listening to the account of the circumstances that really did look black against us.
Oh, that unfortunate flight of Miss Million's into Sussex! That still more unfortunate flight of her maid's after her, leaving no address!
Aunt Anastasia, in pale horror, was listening to it all. That was the last straw.
It seemed to me nothing after that when, from where I stood tense in the dock, I recognised in the blurred pink speckle of faces against the grimy walls of the court the face of another person that I knew.
A blonde, manly face, grave as that of the young American, but with a less unself-conscious gravity.
The face of Mr. Reginald Brace, the manager of Miss Million's bank, who wants to be the manager of me—no! I mustn't make these cheap jokes about the steady and sterling and utterly English character of the young man who loves me and who wishes—still wishes!—to marry me.
For he has behaved in a way that ought to take any wish to make jokes about him away from any girl!
He has been so splendid—so "decent"!
You know, when bail was asked for, he stepped forward—he who is usually so deliberate in his movements!—quite as quickly as the Honourable Jim. How he—the Honourable Jim—had £300 to dispose of at a moment's notice is one of these mysteries that I suppose I never shall solve.
Still, he is one of the sureties for us, and my Mr. Brace is another. The third is Miss Vi Vassity, who produced, "to dazzle the old boy," a rustling sheaf of notes and a sliding, gleaming handful of sovereigns from the gold mesh bag, as well as her blue cheque-book and a smile that was a perfect guarantee of opulence.
Let me see, what came next? We were "released," of course, and I remember standing on the pavement outside the doors of that detestable place, I still holding Miss Million mechanically by the arm and finding ourselves the centre of a group of our friends.
The group surrounding us two criminals on the pavement outside the police-court consisted of Miss Vi Vassity, who was very showy, cheery, and encouraging; Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, very protective of his cousin; the Honourable James Burke; Mr. Brace, and one or two theatrical people who had recognised London's Love, and had come over to exchange loud greetings with her.
On the outskirts of this talking, gesticulating crowd of people there appeared a tall, rigidly erect feminine figure in grey tweed, and a black hat that managed to be at the same time unutterably frumpy and "the hat of a lady."
It was, of course, the hat of my Aunt Anastasia. Over the upholstered shoulder of Miss Million's American cousin I caught her eye. I then saw her thin lips pronouncing my name:
"Beatrice."
I moved away from Mr. Burke, who was standing very close to me, and went up to her. What to say to her I did not know.
But she spoke first, in the very quiet, very concentrated tone of voice that she always used in the old days when I was "in for a row."
"Beatrice, you will come home with me at once."
It was not so much an order as a stated fact. People who put their wishes in that way are not accustomed to be disobeyed.
My Aunt Anastasia didn't think for one moment that I should disobey her. She imagined that I should at once leave this crowd of extraordinary people, for I saw her glance of utter disapproval sweeping them all! She imagined that I should return with her to the little nouveau-pauvre villa at Putney and listen like a lamb to all she had to say.
Six months ago I should have done this, of course. But now—too much had happened in between. I had seen too many other people, too many aspects of life that was not the tiny stereoscopic view of things as they appear to the Aunt Anastasias of this world.
I realised that I was a woman, and that this other woman, who had dominated me for so long, had no claim upon me now.
I said gently and quietly, but quite firmly: "I amvery sorry, Aunt Anastasia, but I can't come just now."
"What do you mean, Beatrice?" this icily. "You don't seem to see that you are singularly fortunate in having a home still open to you," said my aunt. "After the disgrace that you have brought, this morning, upon our family——"
"What's all this? What's all this?" broke in the cheerful, unabashed voice of Miss Vi Vassity.
That lady had broken away from her theatrical friends—young men with soft hats and clean-cut features—and, accompanied by her usual inevitable jingle of gold hanging charms and toys and knick-knacks—had turned to me.
She caught my arm in her plump, white-gloved hand and beamed good-naturedly upon my frozen aunt.
"Who's your lady friend, Smithie, my dear?" demanded London's Love, who had never looked more showily vulgar.
The grimy background of street and police-court walls seemed to throw up the sudden ins-and-outs of her sumptuous, rather short-legged figure, topped by that glittering hair and finished off by a pair of fantastically high-heeled French boots of the finest and whitest kid.
No wonder my fastidious aunt gazed upon her with that petrified look!
London's Love didn't seem to see it. She went on gaily: "Didn't half fill the stalls, our party this morning, what, what? Might have been 'some' divorce case! Now for a spot of lunch to wash it all down. We're all going on to the Cecil. Come on, Jim," to Mr. Burke.
"Come on—I didn't catch your boy's name, Miss Smith—yours, I mean," tapping the arm of Mr. Reginald Brace, who looked very nearly as frozen as my aunt herself. "Still, you'll come. And you, dear?"
This to no less a person than Miss Anastasia Lovelace.
"This is my aunt, Miss Lovelace," I put in hurriedly. "Aunt Anastasia, this is Miss Vassity, who, as you said, was kind enough to—to go bail for us just now in court——"
The bend of my aunt's neck and frumpy hat towards Miss Vi Vassity was something more crushingly frigid than the cut direct would have been.
Still London's Love took it all in good part; holding out that plump white paw of hers, and taking my aunt's untendered hand warmly into her own.
"Pleased to meet you," she said heartily. "Your little niece here is a great pal o' mine. I was sorry to see her in a mess. Shockin' naughty girl, though, isn't she? Nickin' rubies. Tut, tut. Why didn't you bring her up better, eh?" suggested England's Premier Comedienne.
There are absolutely no words to describe the deepening of the horror on poor Aunt Anastasia's face as she looked and listened and "took in" generally the society in which her only niece found herself!
Miss Vi Vassity's loud, gay tones seemed to permeate that group and that situation just as a racing wave ripples over pebbles and seaweed and sand-castles alike.
"Girls will be girls! I never intend to be anything else myself," announced the artiste joyously. "You'recoming along with her, Miss—Lovelace, is it? Pretty stage name that 'ud make, boys. 'Miss Love Lace,' eh? Look dandy on the bills. You'll sit next your young niece here, and see she don't go slipping any of the spoons off the table inside her camisole. You never know what's going to go next with these kleptomaniacs. Er—hur!"
She gave a little exaggerated cough. "I'll have to keep my own eye on the other jewel thief, Nellie Million—d'you know her?"
Here I saw my aunt's cold, grey eye seeming to go straight through the face and form of the girl who used to be her maid-of-all-work.
Miss Million, in her rather crushed but very "good"-looking pink linen gown, held her small head high and glared back defiantly at the woman who used to take her to task for having failed to keep a wet clean handkerchief over the butter-dish. She (my mistress) seemed to gain confidence and poise as soon as she stood near the large, grey-clad figure of her American cousin.
All through this the voice of Miss Vi Vassity rippled on. "I'd better introduce the gentleman. This is Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, the inventor. I don't mean 'liar.' One o' those is enough in a party, eh, Jim? This is the Honourable Mr. James Burke, of Ballyneck Castle. This is Mr. Brace. Now we're all here; come along——"
"Thank you very much, but I think I will say 'Good morning,'" broke in my aunt's most destructively polite tones. "Come, Beatrice. I am taking my niece with me."
Here there occurred that of which I am sure Miss Million has often dreamed, both when she was a little, twenty-pound-a-year maid-of-all-work and lately, since she's been the heiress of a fortune.
She struck!
She, once dependent upon every order from those thin, aristocratic lips of Miss Anastasia Lovelace's, gave her own order to her own ex-mistress.
"Very sorry, Miss Lovelace, but I can't spare your niece to go with you just now," she announced, in her "that-settles-it" sounding Cockney accent. "I want her to change me for luncheon.
"Friday is her afternoon out," enlarged Miss Million, encouraging herself with an upward glance into the grave, boyish, American face of her cousin, and speaking more authoritatively still. "I can't have her gallivanting off to you nor to any one else just this minute. It's not convenient. She's my maid now, you see——"
My aunt's glance was that of a basilisk, her tone like the cut of a whip, as she retorted coldly: "My niece has nothing more to do with you. She will leave you at once. She is no longer in your—your grotesque service."
"My service is as good as yours was, and a fat lot better, I can tell you, Miss Lovelace," riposted my mistress, becoming suddenly shrill and flushed. "I give the girl sixty pounds a year, and take her about with me to all my own friends, same as if she was my sister.
"Yes. You needn't look like that because I do.Ask her. The first time in her life she's ever had a good time is now, since she's been working for some one that does realise that a girl's got to have her bit of fun and liberty same as everybody else, be she duchess or be she lady's-maid!"
"She is a lady's-maid no longer," said my Aunt Anastasia, in a voice that shook. The others looked fearfully uncomfortable, all except Miss Vi Vassity, who seemed to be hanging with the keenest enjoyment upon every syllable that fell from the lips of the two "opposing parties."
"My niece is no longer a lady's-maid," repeated Aunt Anastasia. "She leaves your service here and now."
"Not without notice," said the stubborn Million, in a voice that brought the whole of our inconvenient little Putney kitchen before my mental gaze. Verily she had recovered from her bad attack of stage-fright in court just before.
"A girl's got to give her month's notice or to give up a month's wages," said my Aunt Anastasia with a curling lip. "That is easily settled. My niece is in no need of a month's wages from some one who is—charged with common theft——"
"Why, she's 'charged' herself, as far as that goes!" Million gave back quickly. "If I've taken that old ruby, my maid knows all about it, and she's in it with me! You heard for yourself, Miss Lovelace, what that old Rattenheimer said in there just now. It's her he suspects—your niece! It's her he didn't want to let go, bail or no bail!"
What a wrangle!
It was a most inappropriate place for a wrangle, I know. But there they still stood and wrangled in the open street outside the police-station, ex-mistress and ex-maid, while passers-by stared curiously at them, and I and the three young men stood by, wondering what in the world would be said next.
"A month's wages, too!" repeated my young mistress, with the snorting laugh with which she used to rout the butcher-boys of Putney.
"It's a fat lot more than a month's wages that's doo from your niece to me, Miss Lovelace, and so I tell you! Two quarters' salary. That's what I've advanced my maid, so's she could get herself the sort of rig-out that she fancied. First time in her life the girl's been turned out like a young lady."
Here Miss Million waved a hand towards my perfectly cut black, taking in every detail from the small hat to the delight-giving silk stockings and suède shoes.
"Yes, for all her aristocratic relations they never done that for her—why, you know what a pretty girl you said she was, Vi"—turning upon London's Love, who nodded appreciatively.
"Well, you wouldn't ha' known her if you'd seen her in any old duds like she used to have to wear when she was only 'my niece'"—here a vindictive and quite good imitation of my Aunt Anastasia's voice.
"Now there's some shape in her"—this is good, from Million, who's picked up everything about clothes from me!—"and who's she got to thank for it? Me,and my good wages," concluded my mistress, with unction. "Me, and my thirty pounds that I advanced her in the first week. She can't go——"
"I don't want to!" I put in, but Miss Million grimaced me into silence. She meant to have her say, her own, long-deferred say, out.
"She can't go without she pays up what's owing to me first," declared my mistress triumphantly. "So what's she going to do?"
This certainly was a "poser" to poor Aunt Anastasia.
Full well I knew that she had not thirty pounds in the world that she could produce at a moment's or even at a month's notice.
Her tiny income is so tied up that she cannot touch the capital. And I know that, careful as she is, there is never more than twelve pounds between herself and a pauper's grave, so to speak.
I saw her turn a little whiter where she stood. She darted at me a glance of the deadliest reproach. I had brought her to this! To being worsted by a little jumped-up maid-servant!
Million, I must say, made the most of the situation. "There y'are, you see," she exulted. "Your niece has gone and spent all that money. And you haven't got it to reimburse it. You can't pay up! Ar! Those that give 'emselves the airs of being the Prince of Wales and all the Royal Family, and there's nothing they can't do—they ought to make sure that they have something to back it up with before they start!"
So true! So horribly true—poor Aunt Anastasia!
She said in her controlled voice: "The money shall certainly be paid. I will write."
I saw her face a mask of worry, and then she turned away.
As she walked down the street towards the Strand again, I saw her sway once, a little.
"Oh," I exclaimed involuntarily, "she ought not to walk. I don't believe she's well. She ought not to be alone, perhaps——"
And I turned to the young man to whom I suppose I have a right to turn, since he has asked me to marry him. At that moment I felt that it was such a comfort he was there; steady and reliable and conscientious.
"Mr. Brace!" I appealed to him a little shyly. "If you would be so kind! I wonder if you would mind—I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to take my aunt home?"
"Oh—er—yes, I should be delighted," said Mr. Brace quickly, but flushing all over his blonde face and looking suddenly and acutely miserable.
It was a great astonishment to me that the young man wasn't off to carry out this wish of mine before it had finished leaving my lips. Still, it wasn't his fault at all. Oh, no; I see his point of view quite well.
"That is—Do you think, perhaps, that your aunt might not find it distasteful to be addressed by me? You see the last time she spoke to me, it was—er—not on the friendliest terms, and—er——"
"Aw, look here, Mr. Brace, don't you worry!" broke in the joyously, matter-of-fact voice of London's Love."You stay with your young lady and come on to lunch. Her aunt's being attended to all right without you. Look at that!"
"That" was certainly an unexpected scene towards which Miss Vi Vassity waved her tightly gloved hand.
I gazed in wonder in that direction.
There, on the pavement at the end of the turning into the Strand, stood the scraggy, erect, grey-clad, frumpily hatted figure of my Aunt Anastasia. And beside her, close beside her, was the Honourable James Burke! He must have broken away from the group almost at the moment that she did, and gone up to her.
What could he have said?
The "cheek" of that man! Is there anybody that he wouldn't mind tackling?
For he was leaning confidentially towards my so forbidding aunt. He was talking fluently to her about something. He was smiling down at her—I caught the curve of his cheek in profile.
And—could it be true?—my Aunt Anastasia actually didn't mind him!
I only saw her back; but you know how expressive backs can be. And the usually rigid, flat shoulders with the Victorian corset-ridge, and the lady-like waist and scarcely existent hips of my aunt were positively expressing mollification, friendliness, gratification!
"The old girl's all right with Jim to look after her," said Miss Vi Vassity, cheerfully to me, adding, with a large wink: "What worked the trick with her was the cue 'Ballyneck Castle,' I bet you. Me and Nellie and the rest of us weren't quite class enough for her ladyship.But you can't go wrong with these old Irish kings! So little known about 'em. Eh, Hiram? There! Milord has got a taxi for Auntie Lovelace"—which was surprisingly true.
"Got off with her, hasn't he?" laughed London's Love. "S'prised at her at her time o' life. Still, there's no fool like an old fool. I ought to know; nothing at 85 can resist little Me. Now, then, lunch at last. I guess you're all fairly perishing."
We were.
But there was one picture that remained with me even after we all got to the Cecil and the whole party—including Miss Million's maid—were sitting greedily concentrating upon the menu at one of the round tables in the big dining-room.
This was the picture of my Aunt Anastasia whirling towards Putney in that taxi—she who never, never can afford the luxury of a cab!—accompanied by the Honourable James Burke!
What would that drive be like? What would that unscrupulous young Irishman say to her, and she to him?
Would she ask him into No. 45? And—would he go?
Would she ask questions about her niece, Miss Million's maid, and would he answer them?
Oh! How I long to know these things! My wish for that is so keen that it causes me to forget even the black fog of suspicion under which my mistress and I will have to move while we are still "on bail." How I wish the Honourable Jim would hurry up andcome back, just so that I could hear all about his tête-à-tête with my aunt!
But as it is, there's plenty to occupy me. A delicious lunch before me to make up for no dinner the night before, and a prison breakfast this morning!
At the head of the table Miss Vi Vassity, with her stream of comment as cheering and bright as the Bubbley in our glasses, which she insisted on standing all round! Beside me my very eligible and nice would-be fiancé, Mr. Reginald Brace, a young man that any girl ought to be glad to be sitting next.
I don't mean "ought," of course. I mean "would." I was, I know.
Mr. Brace was so kind, and tried all the time to be so sympathetic and helpful. I shall never forget his goodness. And he was really most apologetic about not having rushed to help Aunt Anastasia the minute I said anything about it.
"You see, I really think she would have preferred not to speak to me," he said. Then anxiously: "You are not annoyed with me, Miss Lovelace? You don't feel I could have done anything else?"
"Of course, you couldn't," I said.
"It seems too bad, the first time you asked me to do anything," he muttered over his plate. "I who want so to do things for you."
"Oh, please don't," I said quickly.
He said: "I am afraid you are a little annoyed with me, Beatrice——"
"Indeed I'm not," I protested through all the racketof Vi Vassity's talk above the pretty flowery table, "only——"
"Only what?"
"Well, I don't think I said you might call me that," I said, colouring.
He lowered his voice and said earnestly: "Are you going to say I may? I know it's not yet quite a week since I asked you. But couldn't I have my answer before that? I want so to take you away from all these people."
There was an expression of the most ungrateful disgust on his fair, Puritan sort of face as he turned it for a moment from me to that of the bubbling-over music-hall artiste who was his hostess.
"None of these people are fit," he declared resentfully, "to associate with you."
"You forget that plenty of people might not think I was fit to associate with! A girl who is arrested for jewel robbery!"
"Your own fault, Miss Lovelace, if I may say so! If you hadn't been here with Miss Million"—another ungrateful glance—"this suspicion wouldn't have touched you."
"If I hadn't brought Miss Million here, it wouldn't have touched her!"
"That has nothing to do with it," he said quite fretfully. Men generally are fretful, I notice, when women score a point in common sense.
It's so unexpected.
"The question still is—Are you going to make me the happiest man in the world by marrying me?"
It's odd what a difference there is between one's first proposal of marriage—and one's second!
Yes! Even if they are from the same man, as mine were. The first time is much the better.
A girl is prouder, more touched by it. She is possessed by the feeling "Ah, I am really not worth all this! I don't deserve to have a really splendid young man thinking as much of me as Dick, or Tom, or Harry, or Reginald, or whoever it is does."
I am only an ordinary sort of girl. I'm not one quarter as pretty, or as nice, or as sweet-tempered, or as affectionate, or as domesticated, or as good with my needle, or as likely to make a good wife as thousands of other girls who would be only too glad to have him!
Yet it's me he chooses. It's me he loves. It's me he called "The One Girl in the World for Him."
That may be a little obvious, but, oh, how wonderful! Even if a girl didn't want to say "Yes" the first minute she was asked, she simply couldn't help feeling pleased and flattered and uplifted to the seventh heaven by the mere fact that he'd proposed.
Some girls never get a proposal at all. I'm really fearfully lucky to have him look at me!
That's the first time, my dears.
As for the second time—well! I can only go by my own feelings with regard to Mr. Reginald Brace.
And these are: Well! He must like me dreadfully much to have proposed to me so soon again. He must adore me! I suppose I must be rather nice to look at, since he thinks I am "beautiful."
It's very nice and kind of him to want to marry me at once; very gratifying. But why does he want to take me away from the society of a whole lot of amusing friends, because he thinks they are "not good enough" for me?
Is he so much better? Is he? He may have a less Cockney voice, and a less flamboyant style of good looks than Miss Vi Vassity and her theatrical friends.
But he can't have a kinder heart. Nobody could. And he hasn't any quicker wits—that I've seen for myself.
It was magnificent of him to come to the court and to go bail for Miss Million and me directly he heard that we were suspected of robbery.
But, still——He must have known that we were innocent. Miss Million is a client of his, and he knows all about my people. I think a good deal of him for sticking to us. But I should have despised him if he hadn't. I like him. But, after all, when a girl says she'll marry a man, she means, or ought to mean, that he appeals to her more than any man she's ever met in her life.
It means she's sure she never will meet a man she could like more. It means he's the type of looks she likes, the kind of voice she loves to listen to, all the mental and physical qualities that call, softly, to something in her, saying:
"Here! Come to me. Come! It may be to settle down for life in a tiny suburban villa with one bed of calceolarias in the back garden and the kitchen range continually out of sorts. It may be to a life of followingthe drum from one outpost of the Empire to another. It may be to a country rectory, or to a ranch in Canada—"
I don't know what put the idea of a Canadian ranch into my head. But lots of people do marry into them.
"—or to a house in Park Lane, or to a bungalow in India. But wherever it is, wherever I am, that's home! Come!"
At least, ought one to feel like that, or oughtn't one? I don't know. Life and love are very complicated and confusing matters—especially love.
I told Mr. Brace so. This was just as we were rising from the luncheon-table. I said hurriedly: "I can't answer you. I really must have more time to think it over."
His fair Puritan's face fell at this, and he looked at me reproachfully.
"More time?" he said discontentedly. "More time still?"
"Yes. I—I'm sure it's most important," I said earnestly. "Everybody ought to have lots and lots of time to think it over before they dream of getting engaged. I'm sure that's the right thing."
And then our party broke up, for Miss Vi Vassity was going on to a theatrical garden fête to sell boxes of nougat with a signed photograph of herself on the lid, and Mr. Hiram P. Jessop wanted to take his cousin out into the park for a long talk about his aerial bomb-dropper, he said, and Mr. Brace had to get back to the bank.
Miss Million said I could go out for a breath ofair if I wanted, but I had to return to Miss Million's rooms upstairs and to set things a little bit in order there, as well as packing up for our next flight to the "Refuge."
Perhaps the Honourable Jim may call and tell me how he got on with my Aunt Anastasia?
No! There has been no sign of him all the afternoon. It has gone quietly and slowly. My talkative friend, the telephone girl, threw me a smile and a glance only a little sharper than usual as I crossed the hall. The hurrying page-boys in brown, the porters look just the same as usual; the coming and going of the American visitors is the same.
Life here in the big hotel seems resumed for me exactly where it was broken off the day that Miss Million's disappearance coincided with the disappearance of the celebrated Rattenheimer ruby. Ugh!... Except for my ineffaceable memories of last night and this morning in the police-court there's nothing to remind me that my mistress and I are still in that horrible and extraordinary situation, "out on bail."
Miss Millionhas returned, her troubles for the moment forgotten; her small face rosy from the sunshine and the outdoor air; also as radiant as if no Assizes loomed before us in a few weeks' time.
"You'll be glad to hear, Smith, that I've settled what to do about all that fuss and botheration about the money," she told me as I knelt beside her on the carpet, unfastening her grey suède shoes. "Me and my cousin have fixed that up."
"Have you?" I said, delightedly glancing up at her, and pausing with one of her small but dumpy feet in my hand. "Have you really settled it with Mr. Jessop? Oh, I am so glad! I hope," here I gave an affectionate little squeeze to that grey, silk-sheathed foot, "I do hope you'll be very happy."
"Well, he will, that's pretty certain," said Miss Million in her most matter-of-fact tone of voice; "but whether I will is another matter.
"All depends upon whether this here bomb-dropper turns out a good investment or a wild-goose chase. 'Twouldn't surprise me a bit if it did that. Still! He's been talking to me again about it this afternoon, explaining it all while we sat on two green wooden chairs under the trees on the grass, as grave as two judges. And I'm taking the chance."
"I think you're so right!" I said enthusiastically. "I'm quite sure he's exactly the sort of husband for you——"
"Husbands?" echoed Miss Million, and gazed at me stonily. "Who's talking of husbands?"
"Why——Aren't you?" I exclaimed, utterly taken aback. "Don't you mean——When you said you'd fixed it up with Mr. Jessop didn't you mean you'd said you'd marry him?"
"Ow! Now!" ejaculated Million in her Cockniest voice, vigorously shaking her little dark head. "Marry him? Not much! When I said I'd fixed it up I meant I was going to 'come in' with the money to float this here invention of his. No going to Lawr at all. I shall just pay him over so much.
"We'll get old Mr. Chesterton to arrange about that, and let him do the best he can. We're goin' shares, and we're going to share profits in what he makes over the thing—if anything. He seems to me just like a boy we sor in Kensington Gardens when we was out; a boy with a model yacht, mad with joy over the machinery of it, and the what-not!
"That's just like my cousin Hiram. Men are kids!" added Miss Million with a profound smile.
I looked at her with surprise as I fetched her little indoor slippers. "And you're giving him the money to play with this yacht of his?"
"Yes. He talked me round to that," said my mistress. "But talk me round into marrying him into the bargain was a thing he couldn't do."
"Why not?" I ventured. "You like him. He's nice——"
"Yes. But marriage! Not for me," said Miss Million, again shaking her dark head. "I've been thinking it well out, and that's what I've come to. I'm better single. I've plenty of money, even after I've paid Hiram all he wants for the blessed machine—sounds like a sewing machine on the hire system, don't it?
"As I am, I'm my own mistress," said our little ex-maid-servant exultantly. "Go where I like, do what I like——"
"Except for being arrested and put into prison," I put in ruefully.
"Ow! That about the old ruby. Hiram'll fix that yet, see if he don't," said Miss Million, in tones of pride—family pride, I suppose.
"But, as I was saying, while I'm single I can go about as I choose, nobody saying a word to me. And nobody can twit me with being an old maid, neither, for when a lady's got money there's no such thing! So there's one reason gone why she should worry to get married. After all, what does a gel get married for, mostly?"
I waited expectantly.
"Home of her own," went on Miss Million oracularly. "And I can get that any day of the week. Two or three I can get. I've been looking at some o' these illustrated ad-verts in the papers.
"And, Smith, d'you know there's a place down in Wales that u'd suit me down to the ground if I want a bit of a change, furnished and all. I always liked theidea of Wales. I'll ask Hiram's advice about that house."
This reminded me of another young man who had once hoped to have his advice asked for on subjects of this nature by the little heiress before me. Poor Mr. Burke, once hero-worshipped by this funny little Dollar Princess!
I couldn't understand her.
I had to remind her gently: "It isn't only a home of her own, surely, that a girl's thinking of when she gets married. I—I never thought you thought so, either, Miss Million. What about—what about being in love with the man?"
Hereupon my young mistress, sitting there on the corner of the pink hotel couch, proceeded to give me some (changed) views of her own on the subject of love.
"It's all very well, but love is not what it's cracked up to be in those tales out of the Celandine novelettes that I used ter be so fonder readin'," she said decidedly. "The fack is, I've had some. Look how gone I was on that Mr. Burke. Fair sloppin' over with love, as they call it."
"Miss Million, dear, do try not to talk quite so—err—quite like that," I ventured mildly. But my mistress was no longer to be guided by what I thought suitable or unsuitable expressions to come from the mouth of a young lady of fortune.
"Hiram thinks I talk lovely, and what's good enough for him ought to be good enough for the rest of the people I'm likely to meet, so I'm not goin' to break my neck no more trying to talk like your Aunt Nasturtium,"announced Million defiantly. "I'm goin' to talk straight, the way it comes natchrul to me. Now about this love. As I say, I been let down once with it. And once bit, twice shy. I'm not goin' to let myself get buzzed, as Vi calls it, no second time. S'no use any more good-lookin' young gentlemanly men comin' round to try and get on the soft side of Nellie Million, and fillin' her up with a lot of Tales of Hoffmann jest because she happens to have a bit of her own. That was a shock to me, Smith, that was. That about the Honourable Mr. Burke being such a liar. It's a good job, in a way. Because it's put me off love for life!"
"I wonder," I said, standing there, and looking thoughtfully down at the well-dressed, sturdy little figure with the black hair that I can still see looking neat and glossy under a cap. "If it has done that, it may, as you say, be 'a good job.' But it might be—a great pity!"
"Ar, go on. Don't you believe that, Miss Kid," returned my mistress with a funny little echo of England's Premier Comedienne in her voice. "Love's all right for anybody that hasn't got anything else to hope for, and that's about as much as you can say for it. But what about yourself, Smith?"
Here my mistress's bright grey eyes gave me a very straight glance.
"What about our young Mr. Brace, him from the bank? I sor him in court, and it wasn't at me he was looking at all. Then there was at lunch to-day. Several times Vi has passed the remark about him and you being very thick——"
I repressed a wish to check this expression. After all, if "Hiram" considers it lovely, and it comes "natchrul" to Miss Million, why should I worry any longer about her flowers of speech?
She then put a "straight" question:
"Has that young gentleman bin makin' up to you?"
I answered her in a "straight" manner:
"Yes. He has. He's asked me to marry him."
"Oh! Good for you!" exclaimed my young mistress delightedly. "Marry you, already? That would be a step up for you, wouldn't it, Smith? From being my maid to being a bank manager's wife! Something like, that is. I always liked him—always thought him a very nice, gentlemanly, superior sort of looking young feller. And so did you, Miss Beat—so did you, Smith! In the old days at Putney, with his garden-hose and all! (Artful!) Well! Of course, it'll be a bit strange for me at first, having to have somebody fresh to do for me, after getting accustomed to you. But I've got my clothes now; and I'm sort of used to things. I shan't feel quite so lorst as I should at first. I shall be sorry to say good-bye to you, o' course. You and me have always hit it, Smith, some'ow, whether when you was the maid—or I was," concluded my young mistress simply, looking up at me with genuine affection in her eyes. "And I shall always remember you, wherever you are, and I hope you'll come round and have a cup o' tea sometimes when you're Mrs. Brace, and I hope you'll accept that two quarters' salary from me now as a wedding present—not that I won't try and find you some sort of a little resermenter when it comes toThe Day! How soon 'ull him and you be getting married, do you suppose?"
She was at the end of this long and kind-hearted speech before I could find breath to interrupt.
I said hastily: "Oh, but now you're making the same mistake that I did about you! I may not have to leave you at all, Miss Million. I don't know if I shall ever be 'Mrs. Brace.' I don't know if I've made up my mind to marry him—I told him I must think it over——"
"Better 'ook him while you can, dear. Young men are fearful ones for chopping and changing, once you leave 'em to go off the coil, so ter speak," Miss Million advised me in a friendly, motherly little tone. "Not too much of your thinkin' it over. You're suited; well, you tell him so!"
I said nothing. I didn't know what to say.
"Or," pursued Miss Million, "if you reely think he's the sort to think more of you for 'keeping him guessing,' as Hiram calls it, well, I tell you what. Me and you'll go down to my country house——"
"Where?" I asked, astounded. I had forgotten Miss Million's new plan of campaign. "Where will we go?"
"Why, to this Plass or Plarse, or whatever they call it, in Wales, that I'm thinking of takin'," said Miss Million, rustling the glossy leaves of theCountry Lifewith the advertisement that had taken her fancy. "We'll go there, Smith, and chance the ducks. If the perlice want us again——"
She gave a little shiver.
"Well, they can come and fetch us from there, same as they did from the 'Refuge.' Any'ow, we'll have abit of peace and quiet there first. I always did like the idear of scenery, and there's lots of that there. And we'll have down people to stay with us, so as to liven things up a bit," enlarged Miss Million, wetting her finger to turn over the pages of the magazine. "Vi Vassity we'll have; must have her, after her bein' so decent to us. A friend in need, that's what I call her. And Mrs. Flukes——" (This is the ventriloquist's wife.)
"We'll have her," planned the future mistress of the country house. "Give her a bit of a change, and get her strength up again after that baby. We'll take them down with us after we've been at the 'Refuge' for a few days; and the nurse. And then we'll ask this Mr. Brace of yours to come down, Smith, after a week or so. Y'orter be able to give him word, one way or another, after all that time, didn't you?"
"Yes—I ought," I said.
"Well, there you are," said Miss Million complacently, getting up from the couch. "I'll dress for late dinner now. Did you think to have me cerise ironed out a bit?"
"No; and I'm afraid it's too crushed for you to wear," I said, with a great show of penitence. "I'm afraid I shall have to dress you in the cream, instead." She was ready dressed in the cream-coloured frock, with the little golden shoes; she was just going down to join her cousin in the big dining-room when she turned with a last word to put in on Mr. Brace's account.
She said: "Your Auntie would be pleased about it now."
I said: "I don't suppose I shall hear anything more about what my aunt would like me to do."
I was wrong.
For by this morning's post there has arrived a note from my aunt at Putney. Not for me. For my mistress!
The note is short enough. It is signed only "Anastasia Lovelace," and all it says is:
"Enclosed find notes to the amount of thirty pounds, being the sum advanced by you as salary to Miss Beatrice Lovelace. She will now return to Putney, bringing your receipt."
"Will," again. Will she?
And the notes!
Both Miss Million and I have been gazing in amazement upon the rustling sheaf that my mistress took out of the registered envelope.
Where, in the name of all that's unaccountable, did Aunt Anastasia "raise" all that money, and in such a short time?
When could she ever have put her hands upon thirty pounds of English money?
Borrowed—pooh! Who has she to borrow from?
Beg—so like her!
Steal—I'm the only member of her family who's ever been accused of that!
Surely—oh, surely, she can't have got the money from the Honourable Jim?
I can't think how else she can have got it, though.
There's only one thing I know.
I'm not going back to be Aunt Anastasia's niece any more!
I'm going on being Miss Million's maid; I shall go to this new place in Wales with her!
Well, here we are again, as the clown says in the harlequinade.
Once more the lives of Miss Million and her maid have been set amidst scenes until now quite unfamiliar to us.
After the noise and bustle of the Strand about the hotel in July, the quiet, leafy depths of a remote Welsh valley. After the glaring London sunshine on the baked pavements, the soft Welsh rain that has been weeping ever since our arrival over the wooded hills and the tiny, stone-fenced fields, and the river that prattles over its slaty bed and swirls into deep, clear pools a stone's-throw below this furnished country house that Miss Million has taken for three months.
At present the house party consists of Miss Million, Miss Vi Vassity, Mrs. Flukes, the ventriloquist's wife, her baby and her monthly nurse. Mr. Jessop, who wrote all the business letters with regard to the taking of the house, is to come down later, I believe.
So is Mr. Reginald Brace.
In the meantime we have the place to ourselves, also the staff left behind by the people of the house, consisting of one fat cook, two housemaids who speak soft Welsh-English, and a knives and boots boy who appearsto say nothing at all but "Ur?" meaning "I beg your pardon?"
I, the lady's-maid, have meals with the staff in the big, slate-floored kitchen.
This I insisted upon, just as I insisted upon travelling third-class down from Euston, while my young mistress "went first."
"We've simply got to behave more like real mistress and maid, now that you've taken a country house for the summer," I told her. "This isn't the 'Refuge'——"
"It's nowhere so lively, if you ask me," said Miss Million, looking disconsolately out of the dining-room window. "Look at that view!"
The "view" shows a rain-soaked lawn, stretching down to a tall rhododendron hedge, also dripping with rain. Beneath the hedge is spread a dank carpet of fallen pink blooms. Beyond the hedge is a brook that was once a lane, leading down to a river that was once a brook.
Beyond this come a flooded field and the highroad that is a network of puddles. In the distance there rises like a screen against the sky a tall hill, wooded almost to the top, and set half-way up this hill we can descry, faintly through the driving rain, a long white house, with gables and a veranda overgrown with red roses. And above all is a strip of grey sky, from which the white rain falls noiselessly, ceaselessly.
"Here's a place!" says Miss Million disgustedly. "Unless something happens to make it a bit different, I shan't stay no three months, nor three weeks. Itfair gives me the pip, and I wish I was back in good old London!"
"Cheer up. The rain may leave off one of these days," I say, "or some of the people of the neighbourhood may come to call."
This afternoon both my prognostications were fulfilled.
The rain did leave off, and the valley in which this house is set became a green and smiling paradise, scented with the fragrance of wet pine trees, and of sweet peas and honeysuckle, and suddenly pregnant with that other flavour which is new to me—part scent, part sight, part sound. "The flavour of Wales"—some quality quite indescribable; some wild native atmosphere richer, sadder, sweeter, more "original" than any that I had breathed in those flat, smiling garden plots that are described as "rural England."
No wonder I've always heard that Welsh people who have left their country suffer at times from such poignant longings, such "hiræth" or home-sickness as is unknown to the colonising, conquering Saxon!
Even Miss Million and Miss Vi Vassity are more inclined to approve of the scenery now! And this afternoon "the neighbourhood" called on the new tenant of this place.
"The neighbourhood" seems to comprise any other house within an afternoon's walk, or even motor-drive.
I heard the car drive up, from my attic bedroom, and I flew down to the front door. For cook was baking, and both of what she calls "them girls" had taken their departure. It was the legitimate afternoon outof Maggie-Mary, the first housemaid. And Blodwen, the other, had asked special permission to attend a funeral in the next valley.
I had said I would be housemaid in her place, so she had sallied forth, all new black and gratified grins.
I found myself opening the door to three heterogeneous parties of people at once, and ushering them into the faded, pretty, pot-pourri-scented drawing-room. It was empty. My mistress and her guests had suddenly fled!
They—Miss Million, Vi Vassity, and Mrs. Flukes—had betaken themselves into the bedroom that has been given over to the baby's nursery, and were sitting over the fire there gossiping with the young, mauve-clad monthly nurse.
"Must I go down? Oh, what a nuisance; now I'll have to change," began my mistress, but I was firm.
"You'll go down in your garden tweeds and your brown boots as you are," I said, "so as not to keep the people waiting."
"What style of people are they? What do they look like, dear?" put in Vi Vassity eagerly. She has been strangling yawns all the morning, and I am sure she was only too delighted at the idea of seeing a fresh face. "Any nice boys with them?"
"No. No men at all——"
"Never are, in the country. Yet people wonder nobody takes any notice of being told to get back to the land!" said London's Love, rising to her tiny kid-shod feet, and refastening a suspender through the slit inher skirt. "What are the women like? Country rectory?"
"Yes, one lot were," I reported. "The others that came in the motor wore sort of very French hats and feather boas, and look as if they never walked."
"Charity matinée," commented England's Premier Comedienne, bustling to the door. "It's a shame not to dress for 'em. I shan't be long, Nellie. You and Ag go down first."
"How can I go down to the company until I've given my little Basil his four o'clock feed?" protested the ventriloquist's wife. She held out her arms for the long white bundle of shawls that Olive, the young nurse, lifted from the cradle set on two chairs in the corner of the room. "Nellie'll have to make her entrance alone."
And she did.
The confidence in herself that was first inspired by the Honourable Jim has been greatly fostered by Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. So I was not afraid that Miss Million would be really overpoweringly shy, even on entering a drawing-room full of strange callers.
I left her at the drawing-room door, and was hastening kitchenwards again to bring out the tea when the front-door bell rang once more. I opened it to two very tall girls in Burberry mackintoshes.
They were both young; one had a long black plait down her back. Both of them wore the same expression of suppressed and gleeful, giggling excitement as I told them that Miss Million was at home.
"Then, now for it!" breathed the flapper with theplait, in a gale of a whisper, as I took her mackintosh. Both girls were in blue serge underneath, of a cut more chastened than their arrogantly young voices. "I wonder what on earth she's going to be like!"
"Alice! Do shut up!" muttered the elder girl angrily. Then, turning to me: "Are there crowds of other people here already?"
"Yes, Miss," I answered demurely. But I felt a sudden warm sympathy with the two young things in the hall. We had, I suspected, the same kind of voice, the same carriage of the head, we had had the same sort of clothes.
We'd been "raised," as Mr. Jessop puts it, with much the same outlook. We had a class in common, the class of the nouveaux-pauvres! Our eyes flashed understanding as they met.
Then the younger girl exclaimed: "Wait a minute. Imustfinish laughing before we go in!"
And she stood for a full minute, quivering and swaying and rocking with perfectly silent mirth. Then she pulled herself together and said gravely:
"Right. I've finished now. Say the Miss Owens, please."
I rather wanted to have a good silent laugh to myself as I solemnly announced the two girls.
They came, I afterwards gleaned, from the long white house that faces us across the valley. Who the other people were who were filling the chintz-covered couch and easy-chairs in the drawing-room I didn't gather.
I haven't "disentangled" the different hats and facesand voices and costumes; I suppose I shall do so in due course, and shall be able to give a clear description of each one of these callers "from the neighbourhood" upon Miss Million. I knew she would be an object of curiosity to any neighbourhood to which she came!
And I wonder how many of these people know that she is one of the heroines of the Rattenheimer ruby case, that hangs over our heads like a veritable sword of Damocles the whole time!
But to get on to the principal excitement of the afternoon—the utterly unlooked-for surprise that awaited me in the kitchen!
The typically Welsh kitchen in this newly acquired place of Miss Million's is to me the nicest room in the house.
I love its spaciousness and its slate floor, and the ponderous oak beams that bisect its smoke-blackened ceiling and are hung with bunches of dried herbs and with hams.
I love its dresser, full of willow-pattern china, and its two big china dogs that face each other on the high mantelpiece.
The row of bright brass candlesticks appeals to me, and the grandfather's clock, with the sun, moon, and stars on its face, and the smooth-scrubbed white deal kitchen-table pitted with tiny worm-holes, and the plants in the window, and everything about it.
Miss Million declares she never saw such a kitchen "in all her puff." Putney was inconvenient enough,the dear knows, but the Putney kitchen was a joke to this one, where the kitchen range you can only describe "as a fair scandal," and nothing else!
If she means to take the landlord's offer, later on, and to take this place as it stands, she's going to have everything pretty different.